No, the web people have it wrong. It's called:
- Failure to do upfront design (yay, misinterpreted agile/MVP/etc)
- Reinventing wheels over, and over, and over
Newer versions and frameworks tend to be 10% improvement, and 90% unnecessary churn.
- Failure to do upfront design (yay, misinterpreted agile/MVP/etc)
- Reinventing wheels over, and over, and over
Newer versions and frameworks tend to be 10% improvement, and 90% unnecessary churn.
PHP was a no-good, terrible, poorly-made, horrific original design for something like powering Facebook. As a result, it needed a lot of good and important improvements.
Or to be more specific, it was a great design for what it was intended to be: a pet hobby project to make it easier to make Personal Home Pages, and was never intended to be a programming language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Early_history
The concept of putting out something this bad, and then refactoring for over a quarter-century to make it almost-usable, is exactly the definition of the webdev way.
The result is a ton of churn.
Seen globally, it's 10% improvement and 90% churn. One "improvement" is a half-fix, another is another half-fix, and so on, where after 5 improvements you're 97% of the way there.
In the meantime, you've broken backwards-compatibility five times, perhaps not always in the literal sense (old code still runs), but in the practical sense (old code has to be rewritten to follow modern conventions and be compatible with new code).
You've also had five learning curves.
And you have a ton of legacy stuff to support, from each of those five changes, leading to an almost unbounded explosion of complexity.
But if PHP and JS are so shit and full of churn, why are they so popular and widely used? And have been used to build larger, globally successful projects?
Early history is in '95, Netscape hired Brendan Eich to embed Lisp in Netscape, while simultaneously pursuing a partnership with Sun to embed Java. Sometime that year, Lisp changed into a new language, which was created and shipped in beta, by September 1995. We're talking a few months.
If we had designed a sane framework upfront -- even 6 more months design time -- the web would likely be a decade or two ahead right now.
Most of the early "improvements" to JavaScript were stop-gaps created under similar cultures, which would need to be replaced again and again. It's not that we didn't know how to make a decent programming language in 1995; it's that we didn't.
Today, I do about half of my coding in JavaScript since it runs in the browser, and therefore on all platforms. It has nothing to do with the painfully bad language design.
Seeing how the trajectory of web development seems to be "pile on more and more complexity, most of it unnecessary", I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be sad or happy about this.
* https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt
There are times when I want slow movement, and times when I want fast movement. Debian allows for both.
* QA to make sure all the interdependencies aline correctly
* making sure the upgrade process runs smoothly, and that going from version X to version Y of some package is well-tested
It also depends on the upstream release cycle of the software package. The distro may wish to use the LTS version software (e.g., OpenJDK, OpenZFS, Django, Zabbix) but developers may wish to be more bleeding edge for new functionality.